pgainc1,

Try reading THIS THREAD, near the bottom.

Rick

Paul,

Start, type

osk

Hit enter look at the On Screen keyboard and see if your system has a break key. Mine does not. Will the pause button work?

Rick

Thanks for your suggestion. I read and tried these already and unfortunately was not successful. This keyboard has "key brightness" for the fn + f6 key and "increase volume" for the fn + f12 key so these don't translate for control-break. There is no num-lock or scroll-lock keys on this keyboard. I can't believe that Dell would sell a product with no alternative to this.

Paul

Thanks Rick. Using the on screen keyboard and ctrl-pause seems to work as ctrl-break. Is there a way that I can program the physical keys on my keyboard to do this?

Paul,

Try reading THIS ARTICLE from Microsoft. Maybe you can find something HERE that works.

Rick

Try:

[Ctrl]-[Fn]-[F12] or [Ctrl]-[Fn]-[F5]

This works on some Dell laptop models.

I had exactly the same problem - My DELL Vostro 3550 has no Pause/Break key ... but I need one in order to operate the software that we wrtie correctly.

Eventually I managed to get this working by adding a new KEY to the Registry. (I am running Win7 Professional)

1) clcik the START, then type REGEDIT into the search box. This will start the registry editor.

2) Explore the Registry, expanding each element
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
 -SYSTEM
   -Current Control Set
      - Control
           - Keyboard Layout

Click on the Scancode Map, and EDIT the key values to match that shown below.
i.e. to have values of  :  00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,46,e0,44,00,00,00,00,00

Once Done you will need to re-boot your laptop, but after that you can use as the pause/Break Key.
              

(Option)
If you want you can copy/Paste the text below into a *.txt file.
Save the file onto your desktop and rename as New_Reg_Key.reg      because of the *.reg extension you can then double_click the file to add the new registry key.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,46,e0,44,00,00,00,00,00

I hope this is some use to others. :-)

Thanks Gorchard, that's excellent, as was your explanation of how to do it.

I tried this on my Dell mini-9 netbook with Windows 8 Consumer Preview and it worked fine. My mini-9 is rather short of keys, so this is very useful.

This Microsoft page shows a bit more detail on how to configure the Scancode Map and how to map keys: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463447.aspx

This now opens up the possibility of getting a Dell laptop again... Dell should pay you commission!

Thanks,

Tim